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JJJ. Chapter 27: The Mechanics' Hall Riot of 1866

Page 1

[CHAPTER 27]
[Page 1]
THE MECHANICS‟ HALL RIOT OF 1866
… neither the majority nor the minority report shows any real appreciation of the natural exasperation of the white people of New Orleans when it was found that a handful of men proposed, with the assistance of the Federal Government, to establish negro supremacy in their midst by putting the heel of the ex-slave on the neck of his former master.1
--John Rose Ficklen, History of Reconstruction in Louisiana (through 1868).
It was not Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens and Ben Butler that gave the emancipated slaves the ballot; it was on our own Southern brothers who made it necessary to save the negroes from extermination.2
--Henry Clay Warmouth, War, Politics and Reconstruction.
The Constitutional Convention of 1864 did not grant suffrage to Negroes; and the legislature failed to use the powers that had been conferred upon it. The granting of the franchise to Negroes of mixed blood, however, was brought up in the Senate during the same year, when the Hon. Charles Smith presented his so-called “Quadroon Bill.”3 The editors of the Tribune tartly referred to it as “a bar to future progress,” and asked sarcastically: “If a quadroon has the right to vote, why not a mulatto?” and rejoiced at the quick defeat of the bill, voicing the opinion that it would have formed three castes--“(white, white-washed, and black), when it is bad enough to have two (white and colored.)”4
During the later part of 1864 and early in 1865 a steadily increasing clamor arose in New Orleans in behalf of the citizenship rights of the free people of color, and their organ, the New Orleans Tribune, became a powerful nucleus around which many

The unpublished manuscript "The Negro in Louisiana" is a work begun by the Dillard (University) Project in 1942, an arm of the WPA's Federal Writer's Project. After the dissolution of the unit, Marcus Christian maintained and edited the document in hopes of eventual publication. It is reproduced here as an annotated transcript, with original typos, chapters, and paginations preserved.

[CHAPTER 27]
[Page 1]
THE MECHANICS‟ HALL RIOT OF 1866
… neither the majority nor the minority report shows any real appreciation of the natural exasperation of the white people of New Orleans when it was found that a handful of men proposed, with the assistance of the Federal Government, to establish negro supremacy in their midst by putting the heel of the ex-slave on the neck of his former master.1
--John Rose Ficklen, History of Reconstruction in Louisiana (through 1868).
It was not Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens and Ben Butler that gave the emancipated slaves the ballot; it was on our own Southern brothers who made it necessary to save the negroes from extermination.2
--Henry Clay Warmouth, War, Politics and Reconstruction.
The Constitutional Convention of 1864 did not grant suffrage to Negroes; and the legislature failed to use the powers that had been conferred upon it. The granting of the franchise to Negroes of mixed blood, however, was brought up in the Senate during the same year, when the Hon. Charles Smith presented his so-called “Quadroon Bill.”3 The editors of the Tribune tartly referred to it as “a bar to future progress,” and asked sarcastically: “If a quadroon has the right to vote, why not a mulatto?” and rejoiced at the quick defeat of the bill, voicing the opinion that it would have formed three castes--“(white, white-washed, and black), when it is bad enough to have two (white and colored.)”4
During the later part of 1864 and early in 1865 a steadily increasing clamor arose in New Orleans in behalf of the citizenship rights of the free people of color, and their organ, the New Orleans Tribune, became a powerful nucleus around which many